New York Markets After Hours

NBC's online push isn't saving 'Studio 60'

FrankBarnako

The critics seem ready to be preparing to write an obituary for NBC's inside-TV series, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip." Tom Shales in this morning's Washington Post said it is "also known as Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme's revenge on NBC for not renewing 'The West Wing' through the year 2525."

The San Francisco' Chronicle's C.W. Nevius was more generous and supportive of the show at the start of the season. "Sadly, it isn't working out. We've hung in there, but it is starting to have the feeling you get on NFL Sunday when it becomes clear that the home team isn't going to be able to stop those slashes off tackle," he wrote.

Hey, I'm a Redskins fan -- I know that feeling.

I'm also a fan of "Studio 60." Although I am an episode behind, and, after the last show, I thought they've got to wrap up this head-writer-loves-show-actress-but-they-broke-up-but-they-have-to-work-together-and-they-really-want-to-make-up storyline. It is, or maybe was, getting tedious.

One reason I've been rooting for the show is that NBC, a unit of
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really was aggressive using new media to promote the show and build buzz. The premiere episode was on a Netflix DVD weeks before it aired. I think you could download it, too. Apple's iTunes is selling shows now: five episodes in a $9.95 package. The show's producers did a live blog after the premiere. And the NBC Web site for the show has been firm and packed with blogs and video.

But the dog isn't hunting -- on TV or online. A fan blog is generating less than a dozen comments for its show summaries. There's nobody home at another site, too.

Now, NBC has chosen to play an episode of a great show, "Friday Night Lights" in the "Studio 60" time slot next Monday. An NBC spokesman told the New York Post that "60" was slated to have a repeat then, anyway, and "Lights" deserves a shot at the upscale audience the Sorkin-Schlamme show is drawing.

He said execs at the Peacock Network do not consider "60" a disaster.

'Ask a Ninja' visits Madison Avenue

The two funny guys behind "Ask a Ninja" are asking serious money for advertisements placed in their podcast.

Douglas Saline and Kent Nichols are pricing their five-minute episodes at a CPM of $50. They told Advertising Age they get 1 million to 2 million views a month, which could mean a price of $50,000 to $100,000 per show. Saline and Nichols were in New York last week to pitch the show to marketers.

Mark McCrery, CEO of Podtrac, the Ninja ad-rep firm, says the pricing is justified by Ninja's audience: 57% between 19 and 34, and 83% male.

There have been 47 episodes of "Ask a Ninja" since the series got started about a year ago. The venture began after the Saline and Nichols failed to sell a Ninja movie script and decided to try something on their own. It clicked. (Apology for the pun.)

Fans were not pleased with the Ninja decision to take advertising. "Presenters" get a graphic at the start of the show and a 10- or 15-second scripted segment at the end, with the Ninja endorsing the product. Advertisers have included Sony Pictures
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and Warner Brothers
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There are other sources of revenue: "Premium" members pay $12 to $15 a year and get access to shows a few days before they're posted on the Web. The Ninja show's theme song can be purchased as a ring tone. And the Ninja Mart Store sells $20 caps and $16 T-shirts.

"We're just a couple of funny guys trying to pay our bills," according to the site. "Bills that are in the tens of thousands of dollars. We don't want to rip anyone off, and we don't want to go broke doing this either."

Disclaimer: I own shares of Time Warner

Theater owners focus on camcorders

The Motion Picture Association of America announced it has launched a Spanish-language anti-piracy Web site targeted to Mexico, www.fightfilmtheft.org. Versions for the U.S. and Canada were posted previously.

One problem, though: It's not illegal to sit in a Mexican theater with a camcorder running, and it might not even be illegal in New York. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday that the city would ask the state legislature to criminalize the illegal recording of copyrighted works.

The MPAA concentrated on international piracy on the opening day of the ShowEast conference in Orlando, Fla. Bob Pisano, the group's president, told theater owners that 90% of pirated films worldwide are the result of camcording.

The MPAA also said it has enlisted the help of the Boy Scouts of America in its war on pirates. In Los Angeles, the Scouts initiated a Respect Copyrights merit badge program.

Google Co-Op shares the wealth

There is so much interest in search that Google's offering everybody a way to cash in.

Google Co-Op lets you put search on your Web site or blog and define its sources. After all, if you know a lot about Pez, presumably visitors to your site want to know more, and you -- as the Pez expert -- can help them find information in all the right places. So you define your own Pez search engine. Visitors use it and stay on your site longer because they now have less need to do their own Google searches. You've become their search editor. Google serves Pez links along with ads, and you get deposits into your AdSense account. Everybody wins.

Especially Google
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of course. By encouraging more people to do more searches, Google creates more places for advertisers to put their messages. That may, or may not, be a good thing.

Stewart Barry, a media and Internet analyst at San Francisco-based ThinkEquity Partners, told The Wall Street Journal that marketers are looking to spend 15% to 20% of their budgets on digital media but right now are spending less than 5%. There aren't enough new-media-savvy marketing people to place the business.

Web sites win, too. Rex Hammock, a Nashville-based old- and new-media publisher, spent several thousand dollars about a year ago to buy a Google mini to give his readers the same sort of customized intelligent searches. Is he upset that, a year later, Google's making this a free service? Not in the least. "We've garnered a vast amount of insight from analyzing the search patterns of our users," he blogged. Now every Web publisher using Google Co-Op can gather this data, too.

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